Feathers & Rainbows Review

Approaching 40 and separated from her husband, father of her two teenage children, Karen Adams wanted and needed to be a mother again and considered solo adoption. Then she met Trevor, divorced, 49 and also longing to be a father.

Feathers & Rainbows tells their six-year struggle to have a baby, through six pregnancies, the horror of stillborn baby Bobby, his funeral, miscarriages and two tortuous journeys to Cyprus for IVF during the 2020 Covid pandemic.

A painful and challenging read in many ways, there is certainly no holding back on grim descriptions of blood, panic, fear and repeated heartbreak. Their terror is palpable as, pregnant for the sixth time and bleeding heavily, Karen races to hospital and to the same room where her baby Bobby had been stillborn two years earlier.

Karen Adams details at the end of her story the lessons she learned during her journey; about egg freezing, exercise, diet and steroids to prepare for IVF and what she did differently when pregnant. She offers advice to those caught up in the struggles and tragedies of friends and family, with sharp rebuke for the negative and the "perhaps it was never meant to be" brigade.

The author, in sharing her long and traumatic fertility journey, tackles taboos about losing a baby, older couples' fertility problems and the expectation that grieving should be done in silence. An acknowledgement also that those who do not succeed in the birth stakes can find happiness too at the end of their rainbow.

#babylossawareness #fertilityjourney